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Gifts and Gratuities Blotter

With the holidays approaching, we wanted to remind each office to keep a gifts and gratuities blotter. The blotter is to track on an annual basis each item given or received from/to clients and wholesalers during a calendar year. Your blotter will be reviewed during branch audits and may be kept electronically as a pdf.

FINRA Rule 3220 currently sets an annual limit of gifts and gratuities value to $100 per person in total during a calendar year. However, FINRA has signaled recently that it may consider increasing the dollar amount for this limit in 2015. We will keep you posted with any changes.

Gifts and Gratuities Blotter: https://investmentplanners.securevdr.com/d/sc1fa7007a2d4fb5a

Correspondence

On at least a monthly basis (preferably by the 10th day of the following month), you are required to send any non-email correspondence sent to or received from clients to Compliance for review. Correspondence includes letters, sticky notes written on a check, consolidated reports etc., but it does not include standard forms like account forms, clearing/platform forms or product sponsor forms. If your office does not utilize Docupace, any correspondence received or sent from/to a client via fax, overnight or mail delivery during a month should be sent to compliance@investmentplanners.com for review. Docupace users should upload each piece to the specific client’s file and set the Document Review Status to Correspondence Review. If you neither sent nor received correspondence during a month, please send an email to compliance@investment-planners.com advising no correspondence during the prior month.

If there are any questions on either of these items, please contact Renee Emrick at reneee@investment-planners.com or 217-542-1220 or Julie Cox at juliec@investment-planners.com or 217-542-1212.